Tuning Igor Sterk Slovenia 2005
Given some focus by the titular act of tuning a piano, Tuning almost implies that middle aged infidelity is something that can be fixed. Indeed it finishes with the married couple of whom Tuning is about meeting on a train platform after their straying has been revealed, very much un-fixed. Maybe that’s the message, that those former harmonies that have fallen into discordant cadences might still be tightened back to some key resembling a stable relationship; maybe not. Few such miserable dramas are as bearable as this one.
Both husband and wife, Peter and Katarina, are successful bourgeoisie, living the life with their careers, two daughters and a house full of new furniture and all the consumer electronics one might wish for. Yet he goes on business trips and sleeps with prostitutes and half-heartedly pursues an old flame from school. She eventually sleeps with her client, a poet.
Tuning repeatedly shows the couple in bed, together and apart, often waking up. Katarina wakes up at night and tries to have a smoke thinking Peter asleep, but he tells her no. She smokes in the bathroom. Later on you see her up in the middle of the night cleaning the bathroom, clearly distraught. Nothing they share is as intimate as this space and director Igor Sterk returns to it constantly.
In a scene later still away from the bedroom but inextricably linked to it, Peter walks past Katarina’s lover, whom he has been spying on, only to be betrayed by the mobile phone he has stolen from his wife. The other man calls Katarina to find out where she is and is surprised to hear a phone ring in the pocket of a stranger (Peter) walking past him.
Architecture also demarks other space they inhabit notably at Tuning’s start as Peter is subdued by the hulking buildings of the EU Parliament in Brussels as he conducts a business trip. Peter’s re-introduction to the female friend from school takes place amongst the sallow halls of their former school. Only towards the end of the film, when Katarina’s mother dies, are rural settings encountered as the family visit the countryside. In flashback Peter revisits via a photograph a summer park from a time when his family was happier, if only for that moment.
Katarina never finds proof that Peter is straying but when he defends a friend in court by lying, we only see the friend’s wife’s angry outburst at his deception to glimpse a picture of how deceptive he has been. When Katarina finds out about this she lays the question bar if he will lie about this then what else could he lie about. She later ransacks the house in vain to try and find evidence.
Uncomfortably, Peter’s photographer friend holds an exhibition at one point to which both Peter and Katarina attend. It all appears to be close-ups of human anatomy and the characters spend their time discussing a hazy picture of a hymen. Much like the rest of Tuning, it is an awkward moment shoved in everybody’s faces.
